Recently some married friends of mine were going to be speaking to a group of teenagers about what it means to be a godly husband and godly wife. They shared with me some of the material they would be spring-boarding off of, so to speak, during their talk. Most of it was pretty good. Their were, however, a couple of paragraphs about the notion of “respect” that I took issue with.
The material they sent me was an article by Wendell E. Miller entitled, “Marriage Roles in Biblical Balance,” which may be viewed/read here.
The following is a response that I sent back to my friends that I put together addressing the notion of “respect” that a wife should have for her husband. Enjoy.
WHAT I DISAGREE WITH
Just over halfway through the article, only a few lines down from the ninth piece of instruction he gives, Miller launches into a seemingly subtle treatment of the application of “respect” within the respective roles of marriage. By way of reference, the section I’m referring to starts with the line, “God has given the third and fourth principles…” and ends a few paragraphs later with the line, “If the wife wants to obey God, please Him, and…”
Here’s the one line that really caught my eye: “Even though some translations of the Scriptures may give the erroneous idea that wives should have respect for their husbands, God does not command wives to respect their husbands, nor does he command husbands to respect their wives.” After an initial knee-jerk response, and then following a little prayer and Bible study, my suspicions were confirmed. I concluded that I completely disagreed with Miller on this very point.
WHAT I BELIEVE
I firmly believe—in direct contrast to Miller—that God does command wives to respect their husbands. In fact, to take it one step farther, I believe that the place occupied by “respect” within the marriage covenant concerns one of the more fundamental and non-negotiable roles that a wife is to serve, as it is directly related to and inherently bonded together with what the nature of wife-to-husband submission is all about.
SO WHAT’S THE PROBLEM?
So why exactly do I disagree with Miller and what is the basis of my disagreement? In other words, what is it about his point that “respect” is not a God-commanded part of the marriage equation that I disagree with and why do I consider it important enough to address?
The problem is two-fold: 1) his distinction between what it means to “respect” someone as opposed to “treating them with respect” is not only dangerous because it can be misleading, but it is also uncompelling precisely because of the fact that 2) he has failed to give adequate and/or accurate consideration to the lexical meanings of, the biblical patterns of interpretation for, and the specific contexts within which are found a couple of words of interest which are used in the I Pet. 3:7 and Eph. 5:33 passages that he cites. As a result, his interpretation is not only unpersuasive, but is also unbiblical, and therefore, unhealthy for our teenagers and quite possibly detrimental to their understanding of biblical roles within marriage.
HERE’S WHAT THE BIBLE HAS TO SAY
Miller begins this section by explaining I Pet. 3:7. I believe he is quoting from the KJV which records the phrase in question as, “giving honor.” Of course, this passage is telling husbands to “give honor” to their wives. In fleshing out the idea of husbands “giving honor” to their wives, Miller writes that, “If the husband wants to obey God, please Him, and show God that he loves Him, he will treat his wife with respect because God commands it”—so far, so good. I agree with that interpretation and application. Most other solid Bible teachers do as well. In fact, the NIV even goes so far as to translate this portion of the verse as, “…treat them with respect…”
There are actually two Greek words used in translating into the KJV’s, “giving honor.” The first (aponemō) simply means “to assign or portion out;” and the second (timē) is most basically understood as “a valuing by which a price is fixed” (from Thayer’s Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament). By way of reference to this second word, it can also be found translated as “price” as in I Cor. 6:20 where Paul says, “You were bought with a price.” We understand, then, that I Peter 3:7 is basically using the word to show that husbands are commanded to treat their wives as valuable or “price”-worthy, so to speak.
The problem, however, is not with Miller’s understanding of I Pet. 3:7, but with his lumping it together with the latter part of Eph. 5:33. First of all, Miller referenced this latter verse as Eph. 4:31. He states that, “The fifth biblical principle is: God commands wives to honor [“reverence” KJV] their husbands (Eph. 4:31).” He must have meant Eph. 5:33 because 4:31 has nothing to do with roles within marriage – understandable mistake. In fact, you may find some mistakes in any of my references to Scripture.
Miller makes a very misleading blunder when he—whether intentionally or unintentionally—understands the relationship between I Pet. 3:7’s “honor” and Eph. 5:33’s “reverence” (again, borrowing the English from the KJV) to be two different ways of saying the same thing. To show that this is, in fact, what he thinks, consider his preference for the term “honor” instead of “reverence” in Eph. 5:33. He uses “honor” initially and then only nods at the notion of “reverence” as a sort of footnote to the language of the KJV. He fails to use the term “reverence” again and instead opts for the term “honor,” which he explains by saying, “To honor means to treat with respect”—which just so happens to be the same exact explanation that he has already given for I Pet. 3:7’s application of what it means to “give honor.”
What must be understood before we go any farther is that it becomes quite clear that Miller understands I Pet. 3:7 to be God’s command to husbands to do the same exact thing that He commands wives to do in Eph. 5:33, which is to treat the other with respect. Notice the distinction he makes: “Instead of commanding respect, God commands treating with respect. To honor means to treat with respect.” I agree wholeheartedly that husbands and wives are to treat each other with respect. The problem with this, however, is that Miller has forced the “honor/treat-with-respect” of I Pet. 3:7 on to the “reverence/respect” of Eph. 5:33 and, in doing so, has twisted the Eph. 5:33 in such a way that it has been emptied of its true meaning (i. e. “reverance/respect”) and been replaced by a false one (i. e. “honor/treat with respect”).
Regarding Miller’s affinity for the term “honor” in Eph. 5:33, I found it revealing that the only English translation of the Bible I could find that used the word “honor” in Eph. 5:33 was Eugene Peterson’s, The Message—and I looked at 20 separate and distinct translations! Keep in mind that The Message is an extremely loose paraphrase. Most of the versions used the word “respect.” A couple used “reverence.” There were even two or three that used such direct terms as “fear” and “dread.” Needless to say, I Pet. 3:7’s “honor” and Eph. 5:33’s “respect” are in no way speaking about the same concept. They come from two totally different Greek words, they’re used in two separate contexts, and they mean two different things.
Not only this, but guess what the Greek is for “respect” in Eph. 5:33. It’s the word “phobeo”—from which the term “phobia” is understood in English. It means—quite literally—“fear.” It is used some 93 different times in the Bible, 62 of which it is translated as “fear;” 28 of which it is translated “be afraid” or “be afraid of;” once it is used as “reverence” (here in Eph. 5:33); and then a couple of other unrelated, miscellaneous usages. These numbers reflect its usage in the Authorized Version of the KJV.
This is the same word, it just so happens, that is translated as “respectful” in I Pet. 3:2 (ESV; “fear” in the KJV), when Peter describes how wives are supposed to conduct themselves toward their husbands—irrespective of how the husbands treat them. Remember the context of I Peter 3. Peter was instructing believers to properly submit to their various authorities no matter whether they treat you well or not (see I Pet. 2:18-25). I point this out in reponse to Miller’s comments: “Respect must be earned.”
HERE’S WHAT OTHERS HAVE SAID
Emmerson Eggerichs, in his book entitled, Love and Respect, says the following:
Paul is clearly saying that wives need love and husbands need respect (p. 15).
My biblical theology of Eph. 5:33 is simple: a husband is commanded to love his wife unconditionally, and a wife is commanded to respect her husband unconditionally. This is what the text says—period (p. 319).
A husband is even called to love a disrespectful wife, and a wife is called to respect an unloving husband. There is no justification for a husband to say, “I will love my wife after she respects me” nor for a wife to say, “I will respect my husband after he loves me” (p. 16).
Albert Barnes, in his acclaimed commentary series, Barnes’ Notes, says of Eph. 5:33’s words concerning the issue at hand:
The meaning is, that it was the special duty of the wife to show respect for her husband as the head of the family, and as set over her in the Lord. The word rendered “reverence,” [in the KJV] is that which usually denotes “fear” – φοβηται . She is to fear; i. e., to honor, respect, obey the will of her husband. It is, of course, not implied that it is not also her duty to love her husband, but that there should be no usurping of authority; no disregard of the arrangement which God has made; and that order and peace should be secured in a family by regarding the husband as the source of law.
George W. Knight III, in his contribution to the book, Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, edited by John Piper and Wayne Grudem:
The last exhortation to wives about how they should submit to their husbands is found in Ephesians 5:33: “. . . the wife must respect her husband.” The key word here is
the verb respect (so rendered by a number of modern English translations, e.g., rsv, nasb, niv, neb). This rendering of the Greek phobeo is proper. Paul uses respect here in the sense of treating the husband’s leadership with dutiful regard and deference. The Greek verb is used similarly in an analogous situation where one human is urged to render respect (orreverence) to another (Leviticus 19:3, LXX: “Let every one of you reverence his father and his mother”). There, as here in Ephesians, the respect called for is primarily to the role the person occupies and not to the particular merits of the person.
Probably Paul chose phobeo¯ in his final charge to wives to correlate his exhortation to them with his exhortation to all Christians, “Submit to one another out of reverence (phobo¯) for Christ” (Ephesians 5:21). By using a concept he had previously used of the Lord Jesus Christ, he also correlates this concluding exhortation to wives with his initial one (verse 22), which said that they should be subject to their own husbands “as to the Lord.”
The respect asked of a wife recognizes the God-given character of the headship of her husband and thus treats him with dutiful regard and deference. Just as husbands have been asked to display their headship through likeness to Christ’s headship over His church, that is, through a love that cherishes and nourishes (verse 25, 28, 29), so now wives are asked to render their submission in a way that is most like that of the submission of the church to Christ, that is, a truly respectful submission because it is
rendered voluntarily from the heart. A wife’s respecting her husband and his headship therefore implies that her submission involves not only what she does but also her attitude in doing it. As with the husband, so with the wife, it is the heart’s attitude of grateful acceptance of the role God assigns to each and the determination to fulfill the particular role with all the graciousness God gives that Paul is urging on both wives and husbands in this last verse of his instruction (p. 169).
MY CONCLUSION
God commands wives to respect their husbands—period. Within the context of God’s commands for roles within marriage, the distinction between respecting a person and merely treating them with respect is the result of an unhealthy oversimplification of the biblical language/terminology regarding respect, reverance, and honor. “To honor means to treat with respect,” writes Miller, but the dangerous implication here it that that’s all it means.
Whereas Miller writes that, “In all too many marriages, it is impossible for the wife to respect her husband, and in other marriages it is impossible for the husband to love his wife,” Jesus (I think) would respond with words similar to those he gave to his disciples after they had witnessed his heart-breaking encounter with the rich, young ruler: “With man it is impossible, but not with God. For all things are possible with God (Mark 10:27).”
